Paradise Cove

by Jenny Holiday

  He wanted to put his mouth on them, and judging from the way she had splayed herself open to him—the network of gold culminated in her pretty, pink center—she wanted that, too. He moved slowly. He had been kneeling, but now he moved back, transferring his gaze from her thighs to her eyes, assessing as he went. Slowly, slowly, he extended his legs, and then his entire body, along the floor. Her pupils, which he would have said were already blown out, dilated some more.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  She licked her lips.

  Okay, then.

  His first order of business was to move the now-snoring Mick. He picked him up gently and moved him to the couch before returning to exactly where he’d been before, lying between her thighs.

  He lowered his head, and forgetting about the golden, gossamer threads that had initially captured his attention, he licked her seam. Just once. It was like pressing fast-forward, he knew, doing things out of order, but he wanted her most vulnerable skin under his mouth, under his teeth, and he thought she wanted that, too. She was salty and damp and quivering, and he was so fucking sorry her grandma was dead.

  He checked in with her breath. It was slow again, but shaky. He’d kept his neck tilted back so he could watch her, and she’d tilted hers forward, so their gazes had remained locked.

  Without taking his mouth off her, he slid down enough so he could taste her inner thigh. As he kissed it, he stroked the creases on both sides with his thumbs. Her skin was soft, but not perfectly smooth. That was the texture he had been admiring. It was like a map. No, like a key. The secret markings that made her her.

  He must have been getting too moony over her thigh, though, because she grabbed his head. Jammed her hands into his hair and made fists. He loved that. He’d missed that.

  She yanked his head back up.

  In another circumstance he might have chuckled. But this wasn’t that circumstance. The air between them was heavy. Serious. Shot through with grief.

  But she was clearly communicating what she needed from him, so he put aside the mooniness. Enough with the gilded light and the golden filaments. He put his mouth back on her, and the way she bucked her hips at first contact and squeezed her thighs around his head told him she wanted him to get to the point. Good. He wanted her to use him for whatever she needed. So he went right for her clit, flicking his tongue over it the way he’d learned she liked. Usually he would draw things out, but she was already writhing and moaning and making fists in his hair, all signs that she was close. He switched to sucking, and she came within seconds, on a sob that sounded like it was half pleasure, half grief.

  He stayed with her as she pulsed, resting his cheek on one thigh. He’d been so focused on her, first on admiring her like she was a painting and then on making her come, that he had lost touch with his own body. He was hard as iron. Of course he was. How could a man witness such a spectacle and not be? But it didn’t matter. It felt not-urgent. A by-product of letting her use him to make herself feel…better?

  That probably wasn’t it. To make herself feel the way she needed to feel. He understood that.

  When she loosened her hold on his hair, he glanced up at her. Her thighs were still splayed, and he was still resting his cheek on one of them.

  She reached down and laid her palm on the other check, the upturned one, and something happened inside him.

  He tried not to let it. He tried to swallow the tears that were suddenly there, just below the surface. This was supposed to be about her. About being an anchor for her, a place to land. Being whatever she needed.

  Her hand on his cheek felt like mercy where there had been none for so long.

  Like her gold filaments were winding themselves around him, knitting something around him, something that bolstered him, made it easier to bear his own weight.

  Slowly she sat up, which had the effect of dislodging him from the pillow of her thigh. She pushed him onto his back and started taking off his clothes. He let himself be manipulated. He lifted his arms up so she could work his T-shirt off and his hips when she tapped them so she could slide his pajama pants down.

  He stayed passive as she climbed on top of him and used one hand to guide him inside her. As she sank down, he felt the wetness on his cheeks that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  He let it be.

  The funny thing was that they hadn’t said anything. She had been here, what? An hour? Two? More?

  To say she had lost track of time was an understatement. As they’d…come together by the fire, time had stopped, it felt like. Nora wasn’t one for flowery language. Normally she’d have said they’d had sex by the fire, but that didn’t seem like quite the right phrase. But she wasn’t going to say they’d made love. Because they weren’t in love.

  But something powerful had happened to both of them, and she didn’t need to think back to her psych rotation to figure out that it had to do with grief.

  And then she’d fallen asleep in his arms.

  The fire was down to embers, and the cottage was cold and dark. He must have covered them with the quilt at some point, because they were both tucked under it.

  However much time had passed, it had elapsed in silence. She’d tried to apologize at his door for her sudden, impulsive appearance, but that felt like a lifetime ago.

  And he hadn’t said a single word after he’d chanted her name those three times.

  There were different kinds of silence. Everyone else always remarked on how Jake was so quiet. How he rarely spoke. Sometimes they even used the word mute. She, on the other hand, did not experience Jake that way. He said enough. He said the right things. When he didn’t speak, it was generally because he didn’t have anything to say—and what a rare thing it was, the ability to hold one’s tongue.

  But this silence from him was different. It was an active, almost reverential silence. An acknowledgment of something. She wasn’t sure exactly what, except that again, she felt like it had to do with grief. With honoring it, maybe. Making room for it. Yeah, that’s what this silence was about, making room for things.

  It had been a silence so profound, she half wondered if her voice worked anymore. If his did.

  But the silence couldn’t go on forever. She didn’t know if he was awake. He was spooning her from behind, and she couldn’t see his face. She shifted a little, her intent to pull away enough to turn over, but he banded his arms more tightly around her.

  “Jake, I’m—”

  “If you’re about to apologize again for feeling bad that your grandma died, you can just cut it out right now.” His voice, low and grumbly, was familiar, but it was also a surprise.

  “I wasn’t,” she lied.

  “If you have to apologize for feeling bad about your grandma, do I have to apologize for feeling bad about Jude?”

  “No! That’s my point. The two things are not the same.” They weren’t. They just weren’t.

  “They are the same.” He spoke sharply, and he never did that. “They are exactly the same. We had people, and now we don’t have them.”

  She didn’t agree, but it felt disrespectful to keep arguing. “I should go.”

  “I got a phone.”

  “What?” She pulled against his embrace, and he let her go this time. She flipped over. “A cell phone?”

  “Yeah. Which means I got Wi-Fi.”

  “You got Wi-Fi?” Holy crap. Had she fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland?

  “Yeah. Which means if you have your computer with you, we can watch a movie.”

  “You want to watch a movie?” She was aware that merely repeating everything he said with the last syllable emphasized was not doing a lot for her reputation as an intelligent person.

  “Yeah, let’s watch one of your zombie movies.”

  “But…it’s the middle of the night.”

  “You got somewhere to be?”

  No. She had nowhere to be. The clinic was closed until January second. She had fled Toronto prematurely, so she had nowhere to be exc
ept her room at the Mermaid. And while she was fond of it, it was no accident that she’d driven right past it earlier tonight—on her way here.

  “No,” she said quietly. “Nowhere to be. My computer’s in my car, though. In my suitcase.”

  “Okay, then.” He got to his feet and extended a hand. He helped her up, settled the quilt around her shoulders, and pointed her toward the kitchen. “You make popcorn. I’ll be back soon.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Zombies are metaphorical, right?” Nora asked twenty-four hours later.

  “You’re asking me?” Jake rolled over to face her as the closing credits of Dawn of the Dead rolled.

  “Yeah, I’m asking you.”

  “Well, you’re asking the wrong guy.”

  “Come on. I mean, Dawn of the Dead—this one and the remake—are clearly about consumer culture.”

  “Clearly.” He smiled lazily at her. He was making fun of her.

  She rolled her eyes, but she secretly liked it. “And Plan 9 from Outer Space”—which they’d watched earlier in the day—“is clearly about nuclear fear.”

  “Clearly.”

  She threw a pillow at him.

  “Yes. So clearly we can pick out a metaphor for individual movies—they reflect the fears of the era in which they’re made. But what I’m really asking is, is there a super-metaphor? Like, beyond the scope of any individual movie. Is it apocalypse? Or is it not that complicated—is it just fear itself? What do zombies mean?”

  “I thought zombies meant overtired med students.”

  Right. That was what her grandma had always said.

  She swallowed hard. She’d forgotten for a moment. She was rolled up in the coziest cocoon of zombie movies—they’d watched four since last night—and sex, and she’d momentarily forgotten reality.

  “Hey,” he whispered, cupping her chin. He’d only referenced her grandma’s interpretation of zombies as a joke, she knew, but thinking about her grandma was like a punch to the solar plexus.

  “Hey,” he said again, rolling over so he was on top of her. They hadn’t bothered getting dressed since the last time they’d had sex—before the last movie. He was hard. Not just his penis, but all over. And even though he was propped on his forearms and holding most of his weight off her, he was heavy. Heavy in a good way. It felt like he was mooring her with his body. “You want to cry or you want…”

  She smiled. First because this was how the past twenty-four hours had gone. He had let her lead. Which meant sometimes he held her while she stood at his front window and looked at the snow falling steadily over the lake and cried. And sometimes they…did other stuff.

  And that was the second reason she was smiling. It seemed like her vocabulary failure of last night had infected him—speaking of zombie metaphors—too. He didn’t know what to call it anymore, either.

  And maybe she also smiled a little bit because she was happy. A little bit. Mixed in with all the sadness.

  A steady diet of napping, sex, zombie movies, and snacks, it turned out, made her happy.

  But she also didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. She was leaning on him pretty hard right now, and she didn’t think he minded, but she didn’t want him to think she had any misconceptions about what was happening. So as a reminder—to both of them—she said, “I want you to get inside me, Jake.” He groaned—he liked that answer—and she wrapped her legs around his waist. “ASAP, actually,” she added, grinding herself on him.

  He liked that answer, too, judging by the way a groan shaded into a growl.

  He shifted his weight to one arm and grabbed his penis with the other. He met no resistance. She was soft, open. Maybe zombies were foreplay.

  Or maybe lying next to Jake watching zombies was foreplay.

  Regardless, he slid right in.

  She sighed contentedly. She hadn’t had sex without a condom for years. But there was something so delicious, so lazy about just rolling over and going at it.

  And this was lazy. Not in an “I can’t be bothered” way, but in an “I’m kind of spent from all the sex we’ve already had, but I still can’t keep my hands off you” way. He ground his hips in slow circles against her, and because he was lying on top of her, pasting his whole body over hers, staying fully sheathed in her as he worked his hips, the angle put pressure on her clit. She moved against him lazily, too, keeping her ankles locked at his back. There was no thrusting, no athletic pumping, just small circles, just friction and want.

  He came first, filling her with a low grumble that sounded like a mixture of pained and relieved. She wasn’t there yet, and he kept moving his hips, but she’d lost the friction on her clit. He knew it, though, and peeled his body off hers just enough to press his fingers against her. He established the same rhythm they’d had with their bodies—slow and measured. She was wet, and his come was oozing out of her, and she loved the squishing sound they made when she rolled her hips in time with his circles.

  “Come on, Nora,” he whispered against her ear, his head buried in her neck. He wasn’t hurrying her, just encouraging her. Sighing again, she let her head fall back. She’d been looking at where they were joined—it was so hot—but the weight of her head was too much now. “Come on,” he said again, leaving his thumb on her clit but rotating his hand so he could insert a finger into her next to his now-soft penis.

  Her muscles started fluttering around him. “There you go,” he whispered.

  If she’d thought about it, she would have predicted this would be a quick, serviceable orgasm. She was already so wrung out, both emotionally and physically. She’d had a lot of orgasms in the last twenty-four hours, good ones.

  But holy crap, she had never had one like this. It started small, but then it just…didn’t end.

  “Yeah,” he encouraged, keeping up the same rhythm with his fingers.

  “Oh,” she breathed as the contractions kept coming. It wasn’t a hurried sensation, at least not at first. It started out measured, but it was expanding inside her. When she thought she was approaching the end, the whole thing would start over. It was a little bit scary, not knowing when the end would come, but not scary enough to make it end. “Oh!”

  “Yeah, Nora. Keep going, baby.”

  A small part of her mind registered that it was a little absurd how he was cheering her on. But mostly his words, his low, sexy tone, just poured fuel on the flames.

  Eventually, though, the sensations waned. As she came back to herself, vulnerability arrived. She was sweating and panting and sticky and crying a little—and not over Grandma. She wasn’t generally one to get fussed over what she looked like while having sex, but that was because it usually didn’t involve her partner watching her…do what exactly? Have multiple orgasms? Because that’s what that had been, right? Or had it been one unending monster one? Her medical knowledge fell short.

  Regardless, she’d lost herself there. She had no idea what she had looked like—or sounded like—from the outside.

  He pulled his hand off her, and it almost hurt, she was so oversensitized. “Dear God, woman.”

  Dear God was right. Her already hot cheeks burned even hotter. Had she made a fool of herself?

  He flopped onto his back like she’d slain him. “How can we make that happen again?”

  She was magnificent.

  That was the only word Jake had as he stared at the ceiling of his bedroom, his entire body turned to mush as if he had been the one who just had the five-minute orgasm.

  Her stomach growled.

  So she was hungry, too.

  Magnificent and hungry.

  He rolled off the bed. “We gotta eat something actually substantial.” They’d been snacking since that first bowl of popcorn…whenever that was. He pressed the home button on his new phone to display the date and time—which was actually a pretty handy feature. Look at that. It was the last day of the year. He had a text from Clara inviting him to a New Year’s Eve party at the Mermaid.

  He had lost trac
k of time as they’d dug in. It had been snowing for hours—days?—and that added to the sense of being unmoored from reality.

  As did having every kind of sex every kind of way until he hardly knew his own name anymore, much less what time it was.

  He rummaged around in the kitchen. Things were sparse. He did have dog food, though, so he set to refilling Mick’s dish. Poor Mick. He had grown accustomed to a lot of exercise, but the poor mutt had gotten none in the last while. He’d had to settle for quick trips outside to do his business during breaks in taking care of Nora—in a few different ways.

  She trailed out from the bedroom with a quilt wrapped around her. “Go back to bed. I’ll bring you something.”

  She rolled her neck and kept walking toward him. “I think I need to, like, use my limbs.”

  “Okay.” He pointed to the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the main living space of the cottage, and she sat. He opened a cabinet and peered in. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see. It wasn’t like there was going to be a Hawaiian pizza in there. “I need to make a grocery run.”

  “Jake Ramsey, are those Lucky Charms?” She sounded disproportionately delighted.

  “Uh, yeah? You want some?”

  “Yes!”

  He needed to feed her something more substantial, but he got the box down. “I should probably say something about how these were left over from Jude—”

  “He was too young for solid food.”

  “Or Clara likes Lucky Charms.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “What can I say? I’m a fan.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, those little dry marshmallows really do it for me.” He passed her the box and collected milk, a bowl, and a spoon. “Help yourself, but you also have to eat something more substantial.”

  Which, at his house, meant fish. He opened his freezer.

  “Is that fish? That you caught?”

  “Yeah. I hate feeding you frozen fish, but I’m pretty much out of everything else. This is the emergency trout stash.”